Several management changes have been made at the Hanford Site tank farms and Waste Treatment Plant project to help meet the Department of Energy’s goal of vitrifying tank waste as soon as 2022.
A new general manager has been named for Waste Treatment Completion Co. (WTCC), the subcontractor created for construction, startup, and commissioning of the Waste Treatment Plant being built to process up to 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste stored at Hanford. Rick Holmes, a Bechtel principal vice president since 2014, took the job as of Monday.
About a year ago, Bechtel National, DOE’s prime for the vitrification plant, joined with AECOM to form WTCC and transferred about 1,370 workers to the new company. Scott Oxenford was WTCC’s first general manager, but he took extended medical leave about six months ago. Mike Costas has been acting general manager since then. Costas told WTCC workers last week he has a new, but unspecified, assignment.
Holmes has worked for Bechtel for about 20 years, assigned to chemical demilitarization and national security work, according to a memo sent to Bechtel employees on Jan. 4. Before that he served in the U.S. Army for 10 years.
His DOE experience includes six years as project manager of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The project constructed the first plutonium-handling and analysis lab to open at LANL since the 1970s. Most recently, Holmes guided the Army’s Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant in Colorado through pilot testing and initial operation.
Other management changes include the selection of Scott Sax, president of former Hanford river corridor closure contractor Washington Closure Hanford, as deputy general manager at WTCC effective Jan 8. Sax has experience at Hanford at the tank farms and other key projects and also was spent fuel management director at the Sellafield site in the United Kingdom. Sax replaces Scott Booth, who has been named to the new position of mission readiness manager at WTCC.
Tank Farm contractor Washington River Protection Solutions also must be ready to deliver tank waste for treatment and to pretreat waste to be sent to the vitrification plant’s Low-Activity Waste Facility by 2022.
The company has named John Eschenberg as deputy project manager for waste feed delivery effective Jan. 15. Eschenberg is currently an AECOM vice president in the Nuclear and Environmental business unit, leading efforts to put a $2 billion salt waste processing facility into operation at DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The new position will be a return to Hanford for Eschenberg, who left DOE’s Office of River Protection as assistant manager in 2009.
Gary Snow has been named WRPS acting project manager responsible for waste-feed delivery engineering, procurement, and construction activities. His experience at Hanford includes managing the decontamination and decommissioning of more than 300 buildings for the former Washington Closure Hanford. Most recently he led the Pile Fuel Cladding Silo Retrieval program at Sellafield, where he developed and implemented a revised decommissioning strategy that reduced retrieval costs by $360 million and enabled the start of waste extraction two years early, according to a memo sent to WRPS employees Thursday.
Other WRPS management changes include naming Charles Simpson manager of project support service. He had held the position in an acting role. Mark Lindholm, WRPS president, told employees that other organizational changes will be announced in the coming month.
